# 394 Lai Meisong $5.95B

The majority of Lai's fortune is derived from a 28% stake in ZTO Express, a Shanghai-based courier with revenue of 30.4 billion yuan ($4.7 billion) in 2021.

ZTO Express has about 30,700 delivery outlets, according to a March 2022 company presentation.

Lai holds his stake through wholly-owned ZTO LMS Holding, a British Virgin Islands-based company, according to the company's 2021 annual report.

The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of these proceeds, as well as taxes and market performance.

Christian Arnell, an external investor relations representative, declined to comment on Lai's net worth.

Lai Meisong was born into a farmer's family in 1970 in Tonglu, a county near China's eastern city of Hangzhou, home of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. After failing the high school entrance exam at age 14, he began working at a local silk factory. 

Lai started a business harvesting timber from the forests around Tonglu two years later. That business made him one of the richest people in his hometown by 2001, with over 5 million yuan ($600,000) in savings, according to a report by Qingdao News in December 2015.

Lai recruited three partners to help set up ZTO Express in Shanghai in 2002, after seeing the profitability of other delivery companies where his friends and relatives had been working. In spite of restrictions that banned couriers from competing with state-owned China Post Group before 2009, clients still preferred the faster services offered by private delivery companies in the gray market.

After delivering 57 packages on its first day, ZTO's business grew rapidly on the back of China's e-commerce boom that fueled an increasing demand for parcel deliveries. The courier handled 2.9 billion packages and had revenue of $915.8 million in 2015, according to its prospectus. ZTO raised $1.4 billion through an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2016.

The billionaire lives in Shanghai with his family.